Digital traces of taste: methodological pathways for consumer research

ABSTRACT

With the increasing digitalization and datafication of consumption brought by platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, digital traces of taste are constantly generated as by-products of consumers' everyday communications and activities. However, these data have not been fully exploited in the cross-disciplinary study of taste phenomena. This paper represents a first attempt to develop a comprehensive methodological framework for “augmenting” taste research through the analysis of digital traces. The proposed framework is theory-driven, multi-method, context-sensitive, and reflexive about platforms' affordances. Three distinct methodological pathways are examined, contributing to research on taste cultures, regimes and experiences. Empirical data about Italian hip-hop culture on YouTube are employed for illustrative purposes. Key methodological and theoretical implications for consumer research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital traces
• taste
• digital methods
• netnography
• platforms
• YouTube

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alessandro Gandini, Alessandro Caliandro, Stefania Barina and Federico Garcia Baena for their invaluable support and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the editor, for the helpful indications and kind encouragement. The empirical illustrations are partly based on data collected for the author’s (unpublished) PhD dissertation at the University of Milan, NASP graduate programme in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research. An early version of this paper was presented at the first Taste Research Day organized by the Lifestyle Research Center, emlyon business school (Lyon, 25 April 2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Massimo Airoldi is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at emlyon business school, where he collaborates with the Lifestyle Research Center and the AIM Institute. His main research interests are digital research methods, consumer cultures, and the social implications of AI. His recent publications relevant to this article include "Understanding a Digital Movement of Opinion: The Case of #RefugeesWelcome" (Information, Communication & Society 2019, with Mauro Barisione and Asimina Michailidou) and "Ethnography and the Digital Fields of Social Media" (International Journal of Social Research Methodology 2018).

Notes

1 The case of digital music well exemplifies both platformization and datafication trends (see Nowak 2016; Beer 2013; Prey 2016; Airoldi, Beraldo, and Gandini 2016; Barile and Sugiyama 2015).

2 Hence, this article considers the digital transformation of taste phenomena only in light of its methodological implications, and not as a research object in itself.

3 Venturini and colleagues provide digital methods researchers with critical questions for problematizing media affordances, such as the following: “How much of your study object occurs in the medium that you are studying?”; “Are you studying media traces for themselves or as proxies?”; “Is your operationalization attuned to the formats of the medium?”; “Are you accounting for the ways in which data are “given” by the media?” (2018, 17).

4 For reasons of space, only a short description of the suggested methods is provided.

5 Italian hip-hop listeners are particularly active in commenting musical content on YouTube, to the point that many rap lyrics explicitly refer to YouTube commenters, often portrayed as “haters”.

6 Comments have been translated and reformulated by the author, to preserve participants' anonymity.

7 Such contradictions could also be counterintuitive, as in the case of my interviewee G, who frequently referred to pop music in negative terms as “music for girls” during the interview but, while on the platform, criticized another YouTube commenter for being “misogynous”.